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JD Quotations, aphorisms thoughts & observations
November 2005 |
Democracy is a device that
ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. G.B. Shaw |
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Because we don't
understand the brain very well we're constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard. (What else could it be?) And I was amused to see that Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought that the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electromagnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill, and now, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer. John R. Searle
If we have learned
one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the
long run—and
often in the short one—the
most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative. |
No attachments, no expectations, no
disappointments. A recipe for happiness? JD
Man is the only
animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck
with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.
Everyone thinks of
changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. |
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on Photography: Knowing a great deal about what is in the world (art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature) through photographic images, people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved when they see the real thing. ...Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel. Unfortunately, the ante keeps getting raised—partly through the very proliferation of such images of horror. ...Images have turned the world into a department store or museum-without-walls, where people become customers or tourists of reality. The news that the camera could lie made getting photographed much more popular. Real events are now compared to those of sitcom characters; real tragedies or accidents are described as being “just like a movie” (a practice Susan Sontag first noticed in the 1970s)—Christine Rosen (The Image Culture). Susan Sontag (1933-2004) Marshall McLuhan, the Sixties media guru, offered perhaps the most blunt and apt metaphor for photography: he called it “the brothel-without-walls.” After all, he noted, the images of celebrities whose behavior we so avidly track “can be bought and hugged and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes”—and all for a greatly reduced price. Is it possible to find a balance between naïve techno-enthusiasm for the image culture and the “spirit of bulldog opacity,” as McLuhan described it, which fueled undue skepticism about new technologies in the past? Perhaps devotees of the written word will eventually form a dwindling guild, pensioned off by universities and governments and think tanks to live out their days in quiet obscurity as the purveyors of the image culture expand their reach. But concern about a culture of the image has a rich history, and neither side can yet claim victory. In the preface to his book, The Essence of Christianity, published in 1843, Feuerbach complained that his own era “prefers the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation to the reality, appearance to being.”—Christine Rosen (The Image Culture). Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) |
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Most of us take both praise and criticism
seriously, and often without justification. The more we're obsessed with
them, the less important one's own work becomes. Humility is learned not
by passing comment, but by trying to do good work oneself. And ultimately
humility, not to be confused with modesty, builds confidence.
We see, relate to, seek to understand and
ultimately find meaning in life through the forms we create, whether it's language
or art or technology. When the Nobel biologist, George Wald, elucidated
the working of the human eye, he supplied a beautiful metaphor for the
above: what we see is given shape and meaning through the fine anatomical
structure of the eye—that structure imposes a form that finally, with the
help of our brain, gives visual meaning to the sense-data, the light, that
enters the eye. We are slaves to our forms in every respect, whatever the
endeavor.
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